Does the DO credit expire after one year? AWS and Google credits for >= $100K expire after one year. This really is a genius business move on any cloud provider's part. If you can get a startup to spend $100k of their free credit, they will have somewhere around an $8k monthly bill once they convert to a paying customer after the first year.

It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money in the long run by developing efficient applications that likely won't come close to a $100k credit in the first year. This will also likely result in a much more scalable app and much less technical debt.